The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Everyone soldiered on. In Red Oak, the Grand showed movies nearly every night and double features on Saturday. Kids swarmed to the Green Parrot downtown for sodas after school. J. C. Penney’s shelves were often barren, but customers wandered in anyway, as if shopping were an act of imagination rather than of commerce. The Red Oak Stalking Tigers—no one fully appreciated the irony of that mascot, of course—prepared to play in the district basketball tourney. A student production of Room for Ten drew a big crowd to the school gymnasium. As planting season approached, a worrisome machinery shortage was eased by the state War Board’s wise decision to increase Montgomery County’s quota of plows and cultivators.

  Even if the battlefront seemed far removed, patriotism ran deep. The Victory Day book drive had already collected 500 volumes, and schoolchildren in Red Oak, asked to buy $900 in war bonds to underwrite the purchase of one jeep for the Army, bought enough bonds to finance nine. Great War veterans planned an elaborate commemoration for March 9, 1943, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day when Company M first went over the top to face German fire in 1918.

  The first inkling of bad news from Tunisia came disguised as good news. The Red Oak Express of February 22 ran a front-page story by the Associated Press beneath the headline “Moore Leads Escape from Nazi Lines.” Datelined “on the Tunisian Front,” the article recounted how the former Boy Captain—“red-eyed, haggard, and weak from lack of food and water”—had led many in his battalion to safety from a hill surrounded by German soldiers. Everyone in Montgomery County agreed that in a tight spot Bob Moore was a very good man to have around. But few other details emerged over the next two weeks other than sketchy dispatches about a fight in a remote place called Kasserine.

  The initial telegrams reached Red Oak on the evening of March 6; by midnight there were more than two dozen, nearly identical: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his regret that your son has been missing in action in North Africa since February 17.” Townsmen in bib overalls or gabardine suits gathered on the broad portico of the Hotel Johnson, next to the Western Union office. Leaning against the double Ionic columns, they smoked and talked and listened as the courthouse clock on Coolbaugh Street chimed the hours.

  Most next of kin were easy to find. Mae Stifle, a widow who had raised eight children, worked as a housekeeper at that very hotel. She got two telegrams within fifteen minutes telling her that two sons, Sergeant Frank and Private Dean, were missing; in the morning, a third telegram added her son-in-law, Darrell Wolfe, to the list. “Some people don’t believe in prayer,” she said, “but I pray for my boys every day.” The Vern Bierbaum family also lost two sons, Cleo and Harold, and a son-in-law, and their son-in-law’s brother. Both Gillespie boys were missing; their father, who ran the feed store, tucked the telegrams inside the family Bible. Those who had left the county were harder to track down, like Lois Bryson, who now worked the four-to-midnight shift installing hydraulic tubing at the Martin bomber plant in Omaha. Eventually, word reached her that her husband, Fred, was also missing. He had joined Company F in Villisca when he was seventeen.

  On March 11, the Express printed a headline no one could dispute: “SW Iowa Is Hit Hard.” The photographs of missing boys just from Red Oak filled four rows above the fold on page one. “War consciousness mounted hourly in Red Oak, stunned by the flood of telegrams this week,” the article began. The busiest man in town was a boy, sixteen-year-old Billie Smaha, who delivered wires for Western Union. “They kind of dreaded me,” Billie later told the Saturday Evening Post. “I never wore a Western Union hat because I thought that would scare them too much when I went up to the door.”

  Wild rumors flourished. Shenandoah, Iowa, supposedly had lost 500 men—even though barely one-quarter that number were serving in North Africa. The truth was grim enough. Clarinda had lost forty-one, Atlantic forty-six, Glenwood thirty-nine, Council Bluffs thirty-six, Shenandoah twenty-three, Villisca nine. Red Oak’s toll reached forty-five, nearly a third of Company M, which altogether had lost 153 men, among them the commander and six lieutenants. Total losses for the 168th Infantry Regiment included 109 officers and 1,797 enlisted men. “There is no place to my knowledge where in this war there has been such a large group from such a comparatively small area,” an Army official told the Council Bluffs Nonpareil.

  Everyone soldiered on, again. The Great War anniversary commemoration was canceled. When letters began arriving from prison camps, it became clear that most of those missing had, blessedly, been taken prisoner. Many ended up in Stalag III-B with French, Russian, and Dutch soldiers, while officers typically went to an Oflag in Silesia. “Mom and Dad, I have no clothes except shirt, pants, shoes, and field jacket, and up ’til a few days ago they hadn’t been off for a month,” Lieutenant DuaneA. Johnson of Red Oak wrote from Germany in March. “Send the food parcel first. I don’t care if it’s all chocolate.” Letters also came from those who had narrowly escaped capture or death. “I lost everything but my rifle, new fountain pen, shovel, and my life,” Sergeant Willis R. Dunn wrote his parents in Villisca. “So I’m thanking God for that.”

  The Ladies’ Monday Club redoubled its book drive; collection boxes soon occupied all four corners of the town square. The VFW collected safety razors for the German camps. War Dads, an organization of the sort that in a later day would be called a support group, grew large and active. A speech by an Iowa college teacher who had been interned by the Germans for seven months while working in Egypt drew 900 people to the Methodist church on a Sunday night in mid-March; latecomers had to stand in the choir loft, behind the robed singers.

  The telegrams kept coming. Billie Smaha stayed busy. Life magazine arrived to document Red Oak’s misfortune; the brief article included a two-page aerial photo of the town with labels denoting the houses of those missing, captured, or dead. A New York Herald-Tribune reporter calculated that “if New York City were to suffer losses in the same proportion in a single action, its casualty list would include more than 17,000 names.” In Red Oak, population 5,600, small plaques eventually honored the fallen at the Elks Club and the Ko-z-Aire Furnace Company, and photos of those smiling boys in smart uniforms stood on mantels and pianos all over town. At the Washington School, a teacher named Frances Worley kept an honor roll in a scrapbook; before the names of those lost she set gold stars, just like the stars she pasted on especially meritorious homework papers.

  The second spring of the war came. Buds stippled the oak trees and the wild geese came back and the creek bottoms sang with life. Grass greened between the headstones that spilled down the hillside cemetery east of town. People went about their business as before, but the war was inside them now, as it would be inside a thousand other communities before peace returned. “Red Oak came as close to any town in America to knowing what the war was all about,” wrote a local historian. Surely it was true.

  “We Know There’ll Be Troubles of Every Sort”

  ROMMEL’S army had slipped from Kasserine back across the central Tunisian plateau toward the Eastern Dorsal. As February yielded to March, the opposing lines took roughly the same shape they had held before the Valentine’s Day offensive knocked the Americans nearly into Algeria. The Axis territorial gain amounted to a fragile salient in lower Tunisia; it bowed as far west as Sbeïtla and Gafsa on flat, indefensible terrain that Rommel knew he could not hold against a determined attack. Commanders on both sides recognized that a final campaign in Africa would be fought on a shrinking battlefield—for now, the eastern third of Tunisia. Here, in a ragged rectangle fifty miles wide and 300 miles long, two Allied armies would confront two Axis armies in a climactic struggle for control of the continent and the southern Mediterranean.

  In the north, Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army secretly prepared to widen the bridgehead around Tunis and Bizerte by recapturing some of the territory held since early winter by Anderson’s First Army. In the south, Rommel regrouped his Panzer Army Africa and pondered how to stop Montgomery’s Eighth Army, which in the past four mon
ths had traveled more than a thousand miles from Egypt to begin pushing into Tunisia from western Libya.

  And in the center, where II Corps remained under Anderson’s tactical command, the Americans buried their dead, turned their backs to Kasserine Pass, and waited to see who would lead them forward.

  The Carthaginians of antiquity—notoriously poor losers—had often punished their defeated generals with crucifixion. Whether Eisenhower had this cautionary Tunisian precedent in mind is uncertain, though he was, it is true, a devoted student of the Punic Wars. In any case, to avoid an equivalent fate for himself he had begun looking for scapegoats while the ashes of Kasserine were still warm. In a message to Marshall he minimized his losses, asserting with some legitimacy that “this affair is only an incident” in the broader African campaign. Yet the reeling defeat and 6,000 American casualties sent morale plummeting throughout the theater; sixty ambulances had shuttled the evacuated wounded to hospitals from the Oran airfield. “It’s pretty discouraging,” Eisenhower’s deputy Everett Hughes wrote in his diary. “I can’t make heads or tails of the whole war. We have men but no organization. Who does what?” Censorship kept the home front ignorant of the full extent of Allied losses, but Eisenhower knew that soon enough the truth would out and alarm would spread.

  First to go was his intelligence officer, Brigadier Eric E. Mockler-Ferryman, whom Eisenhower believed had relied excessively on Ultra to divine enemy intentions. The brigadier went quietly. “If a man is not wanted,” he observed, “argument won’t change the situation.” Eisenhower asked London to send him a British replacement “who has a broader insight into German mentality and method.” Lesser heads soon rolled, too, among them Stark’s. He was sent home on March 2 and would later serve with distinction in the Pacific. McQuillin’s relief came soon after Stark’s. Tunisia, as Paul Robinett observed, was fast becoming “a professional graveyard, particularly for those in the upper middle part of the chain of command.” Alexander strongly considered cashiering Anderson; unable to persuade Montgomery to relinquish the Eighth Army chief of staff as a replacement, he instead decided to keep Anderson but to “watch him very closely.”

  Orlando Ward also awaited the ax. As he told his diary, “F and I do not have enough room.” “F,” of course, was the crux. For months Eisenhower had handled Fredendall with the tongs appropriate for a presumed Marshall protégé, even while privately voicing regret at not sending Patton to Tunisia instead. The commander-in-chief had also, inconveniently, twice written notes commending the II Corps commander for his leadership during Kasserine, and had praised him to Marshall as a “stouthearted” battle captain worthy of a third star. If, as Moltke once claimed, a general needed to lose an entire division before becoming truly experienced, then Fredendall’s seasoning was well advanced.

  But reports from the front could hardly be ignored. Ernie Harmon was scathing. “He’s no damned good,” he told Eisenhower on February 28, on his way back to Morocco. “You ought to get rid of him.” Fredendall was a “common, low son-of-a-bitch,” Harmon added, “a physical and moral coward.” Truscott reported that II Corps was unlikely to “ever fight well under his command.” Even Alexander chimed in. “I’m sure,” he told Eisenhower, “you must have a better man than that.”

  A final verdict came from an officer who had just arrived in Africa, another West Point classmate from ’15 sent to help however Eisenhower deemed fit. On March 5, during a break at a command conference near Tébessa, Eisenhower asked Major General Omar N. Bradley to step onto the porch of the mansion where they were meeting.

  “What do you think of the command here?” Eisenhower asked, pulling furiously on a cigarette.

  “It’s pretty bad,” Bradley replied. “I’ve talked to all the division commanders. To a man they’ve lost confidence in Fredendall as the corps commander.”

  The deed was done quietly, in a brief encounter at Youks-les-Bains airfield. Fredendall would receive his third star, command of a training army in Tennessee, and a hero’s welcome home. Soon enough, Eisenhower would develop the capacity to cut a throat without remorse or emollient, but not yet. Fredendall had been given a soft landing, Eisenhower told Harmon, to avoid shaking public confidence in the high command, and that certainly included himself. To Marshall he explained that Fredendall “has difficulty in picking good men” and “has shown a peculiar apathy in preparing for a big push.”

  Fredendall stole away from Le Kouif at 3:30 A.M. on March 7, after distributing his liquor cache to the staff. Rather than tempt fate by flying to Algiers, he chose to leave in a civilian Buick in the dead of night when no enemy fighters could find him, although “there was something wrong with the shock absorbers and we bounced all the way,” his aide reported. Along the road, Fredendall and his traveling party would stop for a picnic lunch of K rations and a piquant French burgundy he had been saving.

  “Glory be,” Ward wrote. But the most trenchant epitaph came from Beetle Smith: “He was a good colonel before the war.”

  Patton was hunting boar in the Moroccan outback when a dust-caked messenger on motorcycle flagged him down with orders for the front. A few hours later, he arrived at the Maison Blanche airfield, outside Algiers, where he and Eisenhower had a brief conference over the hood of a car. The commander-in-chief expected Patton to command II Corps for only three weeks or so before resuming his preparations for the invasion of Sicily. “Your personal courage is something you do not have to prove to me, and I want you as a corps commander—not as a casualty,” Eisenhower lectured. “You must not retain for one instant any man in a responsible position where you have become doubtful of his ability to do his job…. I expect you to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.”

  Patton had been brooding over the still uncertain fate of his son-in-law—he would personally comb Djebel Lessouda for John Waters’s grave—and in any case, dispassion was hardly in his nature. He “damned the Germans so violently and emotionally that tears came to his eyes three times during the short conference,” Butcher reported. Eisenhower agreed that the man hated the enemy “like the devil hates holy water.”

  Omar Bradley, who was to become Patton’s deputy, sketched an indelible portrait of his first appearance at the Le Kouif primary school:

  With sirens shrieking Patton’s arrival, a procession of armored scout cars and half-tracks wheeled into the dingy square opposite the schoolhouse headquarters of II Corps at Djebel Kouif on the late morning of March 7…. In the lead car Patton stood like a charioteer. He was scowling into the wind and his jaw strained against the web strap of a two-starred steel helmet.

  “He is indeed picturesque,” Ward told his diary. One captain spoke for many young officers: “Patton sure scares the shit out of me.”

  Both reactions pleased him, and he wasted no time leaving his bootprints on II Corps. One definition of military morale is a will to fight that is stronger than the will to live; the Americans plainly needed inspiriting. “Bedizened with stars and loaded with guns,” Robinett observed, Patton “came with Marsian speech and a song of hate.” Again and again he vowed, “We will kick the bastards out of Africa.” For this task, he needed officers who “can sweat, get mad, and think at the same time.” And he needed men with “an adequate hatred of Germans.”

  They soon developed a more than adequate hatred of Patton. A flurry of orders intended to stiffen discipline caused an uproar throughout the corps. Every lieutenant was now required to prominently display his gold or silver rank insignia, known as “aiming stakes” for the propensity of enemy snipers to single out recognizable officers. Military policemen, derided as Patton’s Gestapo, routinely fined drivers for improper tire pressure or low oil levels. Failure to wear leggings incurred a $15 fine—“We don’t even have underwear let alone puttees,” one pilot wailed—and to be without a necktie cost $10. It was said that graves registration units would not bury a man killed in action unless he was properly garbed in cravat and leg wraps. Unpolished boots and unfastened chin straps, even in the latrine
, also drew fines. Every evening Patton returned to the school with an armful of confiscated knit watch caps, which he detested as slovenly accoutrements of the slipshod.

  Determined and energetic, he could also be boorish and abusive, incapable of distinguishing between the demands of a disciplinarian and the caprices of a bully. “Terry, where is your foxhole?” he asked Allen during a visit to the 1st Division. When Allen pointed to a slit trench outside his tent, Patton unzipped his fly and urinated in it, signaling his contempt for passive defenses. Fidgeting and yawning during a meeting at Le Kouif with twenty officers of the Big Red One, he abruptly accused them of cowardice and demanded that the “yellow-bellies…get in there and do a little fighting.” When Allen’s chief of staff pointed out that the concussion of artillery blasts could break the neck of a soldier whose helmet was fastened, Patton erupted in a spittle-flecked tirade, barking that “when he wanted advice from a colonel he damn well would ask for it and otherwise he damn well didn’t want it.” After another officer had a close brush with an enemy patrol, Patton declared, “You might have gotten killed. When I want you to get killed, I will tell you.”